WASHINGTON - The U.S. Postal Service is moving forward with a plan to keep 13,000 low-revenue post offices in rural areas open but with shorter operating hours. Fourteen of them are in northeast Georgia.

Rabun County would be impacted greatest among the affected counties in the area. The post offices in Dillard, Rabun Gap, Tiger and Mountain City would see their daily hours of operation reduced by two, from 8 to 6. The post office in Wiley, which is also in Rabun County, would be open only four hours a day instead of eight, the same for the one in Tallulah Falls, according to the proposal. Part of Tallulah Falls is in Rabun County, part of it in Habersham County.

Other northeast Georgia post offices which would be affected are the ones in Turnerville, Dewey Rose, Talmo and Suches, where the daily hours of operation would be cut from 8 to 4, and those in Mt. Airy, Eastanollee, Ila and Nicholson, where operating hours would be reduced by two per day to six.

The Postal Service originally sought to close low-revenue post offices in rural areas to save money but switched to the plan for shorter operating hours after strong public opposition.

This comes as the nearly bankrupt agency on Thursday reported a quarterly loss of $5.2 billion and warned it will miss another payment due to the Treasury, just one week after its first-ever default on a payment for future retiree health benefits. (See separate story.)

Hall County officials believe healthy county employees will be of greater service to the county. With that in mind, they have created a health-based fitness initiative to provide free fitness training for county workers.

The Lumpkin County Board of Commissioners (BOC) recently signed a Settlement Agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), five years after an Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) audit of county facilities.